Human rights coverage spreads, despite government pushback

The media in the Middle East loved the Intifada. Every detail of Israel’s violations of human rights in the late 1980s in the West Bank and Gaza appeared in the Arabic and Farsi press. The governments that owned or controlled these media outlets loved it, too. When pan-Arab satellite television stations emerged in the 1990s, they looped hours of footage of Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers repressing Palestinians.

But it did not take long
for Arab journalists to use their newly honed reporting skills on their own
political leaders. “Prior to the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1993,
Palestinian journalists reported on violations by the Israelis, but after 1993
they also started reporting on violations perpetrated by the PA,” said Musa
Rimawi, director of the PalestinianCenter for Development
and Media Freedoms. “In the larger Arab world we observed the same trend of
more introspective reporting on these issues, especially with the rising
prominence of human rights organizations as well as transnational media.”

News-starved audiences
across the region flocked to the new channels, foremost among them Al-Jazeera,
owned by the tiny emirate of Qatar.
It built a viewership in part by covering social and political issues that
national television outlets in larger states like Egypt,
Morocco, or Algeria would
never touch. “In Tunisia, people learned about human rights violations mainly
from satellite TV stations and particularly Al-Jazeera, which was seen by many
Tunisians as a breath of oxygen,” said local journalist Naziha Réjiba, a
recipient of CPJ’s 2009 International Press Freedom Award.

Outside of the Palestinian
issue, however, human rights reporting remained a tiny component of broadcast
and print output. Then came the Internet. The digital revolution that started
in the late 1990s is still transforming the gathering and dissemination of news
in the Arab world, where dictatorships far outnumber democracies. Online
journalism and blogging are flourishing. Once-taboo subjects such as human
rights abuses are now covered in unprecedented detail by an army of
professional and “citizen” journalists in a region with the fastest growth of
Internet penetration in the world.

The speed of the
transformation caught many governments unaware. But leaders who depend on
controlling information for their political survival have awakened, and they
are turning to technology to censor and filter the Internet. If that fails,
they resort to harassment, attacks, or imprisonments. In the past year or so
governments have pushed back against independent reporters and bloggers, but
journalists believe that in the long run technology will make it impossible for
all but the most authoritarian regimes to stem the tide of information.

For decades, the mainstream media in Egypt ignored
human rights reporting. But in 2006,
bloggers Mohamed Khaled and Wael Abbas began posting video clips of police
brutality.“Once people saw the footage,
they had to know more. It was compelling, and left no room for doubt that
torture was taking place in our police stations,” Khaled told CPJ. The story
became so big that much of the broadcast and print media eventually covered it.

Journalist Noha Atef, who
runs TortureInEgypt, a Web site that reports on abuses in Egypt’s police
stations and prisons, credits the Internet with bringing human rights reporting
to a mass audience. “Reports that used to collect dust on shelves are now being
read by thousands of people,” she told CPJ. “You couldn’t get people to read
this type of material years ago, not even if you printed it and distributed it
free of charge. But, online, people encounter it on their favorite blog or news
Web site and they read it. It has become mainstream.”

And the old mainstream is
itself changing. “Today I get many stories from the newspaper, whereas a couple
of years ago I had to rely almost exclusively on reports by human rights
organizations,” Atef said.

Morocco has also seen an increase in human rights
reporting. In 2002, the press latched on to the story of Mohamed Ait Sirahal,
who was beaten to death in a Marrakesh
police station. Sirahal, visiting from his home in France, fell into an argument with
a local resident and was arrested. Newspapers unrelentingly covered his
family’s three-year legal battle to bring the police officer responsible to
justice. A verdict in the trial of Mohamed Kharbouch was postponed 15 times,
but thanks to the intensity of media coverage, he was finally convicted in
2007. Free on appeal, Kharbouch faces a 10-year prison sentence.

The Moroccan media’s
appetite for human rights issues was further whetted when a truth commission
began examining abuses committed during the 1961-1999 reign of King Hassan II.
Although the hearings of the Equity and Reconciliation Commission ended in
2005, the independent press has continued to report on abuses—and not just
under Hassan, but under his successor, Mohammed VI, as well.

A change of regime in Bahrain
provided an opportunity for the press to expand human rights reporting. When he
came to power in 1999, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa restored many civil liberties
and reinstated parliament, which had been shut down 30 years earlier, in an
effort to address the grievances of the majority Shiite population in the
Sunni-ruled country. At first, the media dutifully covered the government’s
reforms, but then emboldened journalists started writing about the opposition,
rising political tensions, and Shiite unrest.

When Bahrain’s
Supreme Criminal Court handed down prison terms to 11 men in July 2008 on
charges of rioting in late 2007, the media denounced the lack of due process.
In a rare move, they published statements by defense lawyers and the families
of the accused who claimed the defendants had been arrested merely for
attending a peaceful gathering to mourn the death of Ali Jassim Makki, a man
who died during a protest a few days earlier.All 11 men are serving
prison terms while the case is pending in an appellate court.

A number of Bahraini
newspapers, particularly the daily Al-Wasat, covered what came to be known as the
Bandargate scandal, an alleged political conspiracy by government officials in Bahrain to
stoke strife and further marginalize the Shiite community. The allegations were
revealed in September 2006 in a 240-page report produced by the Gulf Centre for
Democratic Development. (The press named the scandal after the report’s author,
Salah al-Bandar.)

“In the past decade, there
has been a marked increase in the quantity as well as quality of reporting on
human rights violations and also the work of domestic human rights activists,”
Gamal Eid, director of the Cairo-based Arab Network for Human Rights
Information, told CPJ. “Much of it began online, but we now also see this type
of reporting taking place in print.” In Egypt, for instance, the daily Al-Dustour devotes a full page each Wednesday to reporting on civil society
and human rights. The independent daily Nadhet
Misr carries an entire page on
the same topic every day, and Al-Mal devotes a half page to human rights each day.

“This type of journalism
has raised awareness among the public—it has had a positive role,” Abdelaziz
Nouaydi, human rights lawyer and president of the Moroccan human rights group
Adala, told CPJ. In some cases it has also had a positive outcome. In Egypt, police
Capt. Islam Nabih and Cpl. Reda Fathi were sentenced in November 2007 to three
years in prison for torturing and sodomizing a man in custody. In Iran, in the
aftermath of the disputed June 2009 presidential elections, police chief Gen.
Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam conceded that detainees had been tortured while in
custody, after numerous online publications, notably Norooz and Saham News, published credible reports of rape and abuse
of detainees. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei ordered the Kahrizak Prison shut
down after the much-publicized deaths of two detainees there.

Throughout the region, a new generation of
journalists refuses to serve as
ciphers at some gray government daily or as on-air mouthpieces for official
propaganda. A 2008 survey of 600 journalists in 13 Arab countries by the AmericanUniversity
in Cairo found
that most believed their primary mission was to drive reform.

“Seventy-five percent of
journalists say that their top priority is political and social change,”
Lawrence Pintak, lead author of the survey, told CPJ. “And you see this playing
out in this more aggressive coverage around human rights issues, whether it’s
in Palestine by a Bahraini journalist or whether it’s in Egypt by Egyptian
journalists,” said Pintak, who is now founding dean of the Edward R. Murrow
College of Communication at Washington State University.

This increased focus on
human rights has prompted a backlash from regimes that use government-friendly
media to attack individual journalists and outlets. Rights defender Eid notes
that the Egyptian daily Rose al-Yusef“devotes page 5 to attacking publications, journalists, and civil
society organizations that are vested in human rights investigations and
reporting.” In Tunisia,
government-owned print and electronic media routinely label criticaljournalists who write about government abuses as “agents of the
West” and “traitors.”

Morocco has turned to a politicized court system to
muzzle the press. In 2008, the state-run Consultative Council on Human Rights
sued Al-Jarida al-Oula in an attempt to prevent the daily from
publishing public domain testimony from the Equity and Reconciliation
Commission. In June 2008, a Rabat
court ordered Al-Jarida al-Oula to stop publishing victim testimony. The
newspaper appealed the ruling even as it continued to publish excerpts
describing torture, murders, and forced disappearances. The ruling was
upheld by an appeals court in late 2008.

In Bahrain,
journalists faced prosecution for reporting on human rights. Maryam al-Shrooqi,
a journalist for Al-Wasat, was tried for writing an article about
alleged religious discrimination in hiring practices at the Department of Civil
Services. The judge dismissed the most serious charges against al-Shrooqi but
fined her. Similarly, judicial authorities also sued journalist Lamis Deif
after she published a series of articles investigating family court judges and
their rulings. “The government has created a culture of fear among reporters
and columnists,” Nabeel Rajab, president of the BahrainCenter
for Human Rights, told CPJ. “Those few reporters who try to write about human
rights are marginalized, threatened, and often prosecuted.”

While bloggers and
activists are bearing the brunt of the government counterattack, all
journalists are feeling the heat. Egypt,
Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi
Arabia, and Yemen, among others, have at times
suspended the operations of satellite news channels, particularly Al-Jazeera,
for highlighting sensitive human rights, political, or religious issues.

“There was actually more
reporting of human rights kinds of issues and democracy kinds of issues a few
years ago,” said Marc Lynch, director of the Institute for Middle East Studies
at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity.
“Over the last year or so governments and the regimes have hit back quite a
bit. The general repression of the media, the crackdown on democratic activism
across the region have also taken a toll on human rights reporting,” said
Lynch, who is well-known in the region for his blogging under the name Abu
Aardvark. He believes the satellite channels have become a little less daring
in their reporting of late.

Al-Jazeera anchor Mohamed
Krichen disagrees. “No, our editorial policy has not changed. We report on
human rights cases when they arise. They are an important part of the news, but
do not constitute the entirety of our coverage. We are a news organization, and
not a human rights group, and our coverage reflects that,” Krichen told CPJ.

“What we have,” said Pintak,
a former CBS correspondent in the Middle East,
“is governments in a halting, tentative, confused way trying to adapt to this
new landscape. And they are adapting in Egypt by allowing new,
semi-independent newspapers to open while at the same time putting pressure on
current affairs directors at the satellite channels when they get too far out
of line.”

The consensus among those
journalists and academics interviewed by CPJ is that any dip in the upward
curve of human rights reporting is only temporary. Countries in the region
cannot seal off information from the outside world. Many of these nations
embrace trade, so they need to embrace the Internet as well. They also have an
overwhelmingly young population that is increasingly wired and aware of freedoms
enjoyed by their contemporaries in other parts of the world.

“This is a very different
world from in the ’90s and it’s a world in which governments can no longer
completely control the message,” Pintak said. “They can crack down on
individual news organizations, they can jail individual reporters, they can
harass individual editors, but they can’t stop the flow of information.”

Mohamed
Abdel Dayem is CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa
program coordinator. Robert Mahoney is CPJ’s deputy director.